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Push for New Ballast Regulations
Given a choice between being sucked into the water export pumps or stuck in the salvage tanks with a bunch of clawing mitten crabs, fish might wish they lived anywhere but the Delta. This summer, up to 30,000 of the spiny, furry-clawed crabs from China have clogged the fish filtering and salvage system at the Tracy pumps every day - shocking scientists who counted no more than a few dozen in the Bay region four years ago.
This explosive invasion of a crustacean known for burrowing in levees, not to mention stressing and killing fish, is just the most recently visible among many alien introductions - some intentional, some unwitting - now rearranging the food chain, ecosystem and environmental protection programs of the Bay and Delta. And it may be the harbinger of the kind of "crisis" the fifty attendees at an October 5 state hearing on invasions wish to avoid.
"It took a water supply calamity in the Great Lakes to get regulation on this issue," said Cal Fish & Game's Pete Bontadelli at the hearing, referring to the European zebra mussels that clogged water intakes and powerplant cooling pipes and led to America's first-ever mandatory regulations forcing ships to dump and replace their foreign ballast water (and its hitchhikers) before entering the lakes. How to get similar regs in place for San Francisco Bay was the focus of the hearing held by Assemblyman Ted Lempert, Chair of the Select Committee on Coastal Protection.
"Invasions are one of the very few environmental problems facing the Bay Area that are unregulated," said the BayKeeper's Mike Lozeau at the hearing. BayKeeper was the first local group to get impatient with the snail's pace of a federal process to first establish voluntary, and then, if necessary, mandatory ballast-water exchange requirements as a result of the National Invasive Species Act of 1996. The U.S. Coast Guard is two years behind on its deadline for developing the first round of guidelines (now due out April 1999). Likewise, a 1989 state law requiring reporting of ballast-water origins and discharges has produced no useful information to date.
BayKeeper took matters into its own hands by petitioning the S.F. Regional Water Quality Control Board to classify exotic species as a "pollutant" discharged from ships and impacting the beneficial uses of state waters - an entirely new arena for water quality law, according to the State Board's Steve Jenkins. Such a classification makes ballast water discharges subject to waste discharge requirements under the federal Clean Water Act and state's Porter Cologne Act.
This June, the Regional Board responded by making exotic species a high-priority pollutant on its 1998 "Section 303 (d)" list of impaired waters. Once a polutant is listed, the state is required to develop a program to attain water quality objectives for it - an objective Lozeau thinks can only be "zero discharge."
The regional action filtered up to the State Water Board, where staff began exploring extending the concept of exotic species as pollutants to the state's Ocean Plan - now being updated. The plan utilizes the same clean water authorities, but governs waters up to three miles from the ocean coast. However, the plan's authority does not extend to "vessel wastes," according to Jenkins, the definition of which is unclear (are we talking poop and trash or exotic species?). Overall, however, the state seems to have several possible hammers to wield against invasions.
"If the federal regulations prove inadequate, the state should move rapidly to prohibit ballast-water discharges using its authority under the Clean Water Act," Jenkins said at the hearing, quoting from recommendations his agency made to the governor in June 1998. "Whether we look at this from a biological or a water quality point of view, we feel comfortable there is a regulatory role we can play."
In March 1998, environmentalists found another legal inroad into the invasion problem. Nine groups co-signed a comment letter on the Port of Oakland's draft environmental impact report for its 50-foot deepening project criticizing the report for being "virtually silent on the issue of introduced non-native species." The groups - led by BayKeeper and the Center for Marine Conservation - called on the port to mitigate for the increases in ballast-water discharges that might result from its expansion by requiring shippers to exchange ballast offshore, creating facilities for onshore storage and treatment of any remaining ballast-water, developing inspection and enforcement programs for these measures and examining more permanent solutions.
The Port's first response was that the 50-foot project alone would not increase the amount of ballast water. Indeed the newer, larger vessels requiring the deeper channel have a lower ballast-to-load ratio than the older, smaller vessels slowly being retired, so the actual volume of foreign ballast water discharged from container ships will decline over time, according to the Port's Jody Zaitlin.
After a little research, the Port "realized there were measures we could take that would not put us at a competitive disadvantage with other Pacific ports," says Zaitlin. They discovered that California's Humboldt Bay and Canada's Vancouver already had largely mandatory exchange regs that hadn't driven shippers away. To the contrary, recent monitoring in Vancouver, including testing the ballast for salinity and the presence of local nearshore copepods, shows that ships are definitely complying. This summer, only 2-5% of ships sailing into Vancouver claimed they couldn't conduct the exchange due to rough seas (a exemption common to most ballast regs); in winter non-compliance was 20-25%.
Encouraged, Oakland sent out a draft ballast-exchange regulation to all its shippers in August, and was "surprised" when most of the shippers didn't balk, according to Zaitlin. The Port now intends to make the reg a mitigation measure not for the 50-foot project, but for a forthcoming new berth construction project (Berths 55-58), which has the potential to attract more lines and ships and thus generate more ballast-water discharges. The decision effectively delays local action on invasion prevention, however.
Whatever the mitigation measures, ports and shippers agree on one thing: keep the requirements consistent. More research is also needed on the alternatives to ballast-water exchange: on-board and on-shore treatment. On-board treatment would clearly require inventing filtration and treatment technologies and adding them to both new and old vessels - something the shipping industry has yet to embrace.
On-shore treatment, where water is pumped into coastal storage and treatment facilities, is an option that some say hasn't gotten any attention because there's no mandate. "The marine industry has always been cool to the idea," says former Great Lakes Coast Guard officer Eric Reeves. "No one is willing to make the investment without a powerful legal mandate to do so. There's no liability for a 'biological spill.'"
Reeves is one of the people Bay Area invasions expert Andy Cohen has been talking to in planning one of the first on-shore ballast water treatment feasibility studies; Canadian official Chris Wiley is another. According to Wiley, filtration on ship (many already have filters on their pumps) or shore can be used to exclude adult critters. Then any one of a variety of standard water treatment techniques (chemical disinfection, ozonation, ultra-violet light or heat) can be used to kill the small fry. Wiley likes the latter best - heating water to 47C kills most organisms. The only problem is that the hot water then needs to be cooled off.
"There's nothing new about the technology here. The issue is cost and logistics," he says, pointing out that huge volumes of water are involved. It's not as if it hasn't been done before - oil tankers routinely filled empty holding tanks with ballast water and then pumped the oil-tainted mix into holding and treatment plants at refineries prior to the U.S. Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which required segregated ballast tanks. As a result, many refinery treatment facilities were dismantled.
In terms of ballast management or treatment, there's "no one perfect option for all trades," says Reeves. He thinks that on-shore pump outs may make the most sense for transatlantic oil tankers, which not only carry the most ballast water of all ship types - and thus have the most difficulty exchanging it at sea - but also tend to go from port A to port B and back again, so the on-shore investment makes the most sense for them.
Here at home, the Port of Oakland has already met with EBMUD to assess the feasibility of pumping ballast into the local municipal treatment system. Such an approach may be problematic because saline water can disrupt existing biological treatment systems, Zaitlin said at the hearing. But Cohen says ballast water doesn't need to be run through the biological systems, just the disinfection process.
The hearing helped point out both the big remaining ballast management and treatment questions and the many regulatory avenues available for curbing ships' discharge of exotic species to the Bay and Delta.
In the meantime, Vice President Al Gore will soon announce the formation of a permanent new commission on invasive species. Reeves isn't too enthusiastic about the prospect. "We've been studying the problem to death," he says. "There's no reason for any more commissions to sit around scratching their heads or other parts of their anatomy trying to figure out what to do about ballast water. This a relatively simple problem to solve. The question is when is there going to be the political push to create the legal force to solve it." (See also http://www.anataskforce.gov)
Contact: Mike Lozeau (415)561-2299 ext 15; Scott Newsham (US Coast Guard) (202)267-1354; Eric Reeves (734)213-6728; Chris Wiley (519)464-5127;Jody Zaitlin (510)272-1179; or Andy Cohen (510)231-9539.
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